The month-end report looks healthy. Revenue is up on last year, ticket count is up too. But the bank balance does not agree with the story. When you start hunting for the gap you never find one large item; you find dozens of small ones. A cancellation processed a day late. A return trip that could not be changed because the two legs came from two different sources. A fare that quietly moved while the payment screen was open. A refund figure promised to a customer that the fare rules never supported.
They all have one thing in common: none of them happened at the moment of sale. All of them happened after it, and most happened within the first 24 hours. In an agency that sells air tickets, margin is not lost while you are quoting. It is lost the day after you quoted.
This article is written as a field manual for post-sale operations. It covers why cancellation, void and refund must never be treated as one process, why the void window is not a single number, how the settlement system's own deadline overrides yours, when a split booking turns expensive, and at what threshold repricing before payment stops being optional. Some of the figures come from public regulation and published industry data; others are defaults we measured on the B2B air ticketing platform we build ourselves. Both are labelled with their source. Even if you never buy a piece of software, knowing these thresholds will pay for itself.
The same booking has three separate exits, and only elapsed time decides which one is still open.
Cancellation, void and refund are not the same thing
The most common mistake on an operations desk is to hear "I want to cancel" and start working without first asking which of three different transactions is actually required. They produce different outcomes, they cost different amounts, and they are governed by different clocks.
Booking cancellation: no money moves
If the ticket has not been issued yet and the seat is being held on option, the correct action is a cancellation. This is an inventory release. The seat goes back to the airline, and because you never collected anything there is nothing to return. Low risk — but not zero risk: when the option deadline expires the system releases the seat on its own, and your customer is left without a booking without ever being told.
Void: the ticket is treated as never issued
If the ticket has been issued but a specific amount of time has not yet elapsed, the correct action is a void. Unlike a refund, a void is not a repayment; it is the transaction being treated as never having happened. No fare penalty arises, no commission is clawed back, and nothing lands in the settlement file as a sale. For an agency it is the best available post-sale outcome, which is exactly why the void window is the most valuable asset on your operations desk.
Refund: the fare rules take over
Once the void window closes, the only route back is a refund. From this point the ticket's fare rules do the talking: is it refundable, what is the penalty, which taxes come back. The refunded amount returns either to the card or to the agency account depending on how payment was taken, and in some cases it cannot be moved automatically and sits waiting for someone to touch it. On our own platform the refund process is tracked in four separate states, and one of them explicitly means "awaiting manual action" — because not every refund closes itself.
| Check | Booking cancellation | Void | Refund |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ticket issued? | No | Yes | Yes |
| Void window open? | Not relevant | Yes | No |
| Fare penalty | None | None | Yes |
| Money movement | None | Full amount returns | Returns less penalty |
Operating rule: all three options should be visible on the agent's screen at once, and the system should say which one is currently possible. Expecting staff to work it out in their heads is how the most expensive option quietly becomes the default.
The void window is not a single number
"How many hours do I have to void?" has no single answer. The window depends on which source the ticket was issued from — and if you hold two different accounts with the same supplier, you may well have two different windows.
Three policy types
In practice, void policy is defined in one of three shapes: a window that closes N minutes after ticketing, a window that closes at the end of the ticketing day, and a window that never opens at all — no void. These three are not interchangeable. You cannot assign a duration in minutes to a source with an end-of-day policy, because the length of its window depends on the hour the ticket was issued.
On our own platform the measured defaults for these three types are: 1,080 minutes (18 hours) for NDC sources, end of the ticketing day for GDS sources, and 5 minutes for other sources. That last figure looks like a data error at first glance, but it is not: on some consolidator and direct airline connections, void exists purely as a "wrong button" correction.
The upper panel shows supplier policy, the lower panel shows the settlement system's deadline. The one that expires first is the one that binds you.
The table you need to fill in
None of this has anything to do with software; it is an inventory exercise. Fill in the table below for your own supplier list and pin it somewhere the operations desk can see it.
| Supplier / account | Window type | Duration | Practical decision cut-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Example: NDC connection | Minute-based | 1,080 min | Ticketing + 18 h |
| Example: GDS account | End of day | Variable | Same day 23:00 |
| Example: Consolidator | Minute-based | 5 min | Ticketing + 5 min |
| … | … | … | … |
The last column is the critical one: do not write the real final minute, write the time you get after subtracting your own safety margin. An operation that aims at 23:59 misses 23:59.
The second deadline: the settlement system's own rule
You now know the window your supplier grants you. But a second clock is running, and you do not control this one: the void rule of the settlement system the ticket is reported through.
According to Travelport's agency documentation, in BSP markets an electronic ticket can only be voided on the day it was issued; in ARC markets a void remains possible until 23:59 on the next business day. For exchange transactions the rule is the same in both systems: same day only.
| Situation | BSP market | ARC market |
|---|---|---|
| E-ticket void | Same day 23:59 | Next business day 23:59 |
| Exchange void | Same day | Same day |
| Weekend effect | Calendar day | Not a business day, window extends |
If you report through BSP — which covers most markets outside the United States, including the UK, the EU, the Gulf and Türkiye — the operational meaning is blunt: your void window ends at midnight at best. The "next business day" comfort that ARC agencies enjoy is not available to you. Planning to look at a Friday-evening ticket on Monday morning is a reflex that works in the US and turns straight into a loss everywhere BSP applies.
There is also a well-known trap on the ARC side: the ticket has to be voided both in the reporting system and in the reservation system, and a void performed in only one of them can still result in the passenger being charged. Adopt this as a rule: a void is not complete until it has been verified — until then it is open work.
Binding-deadline rule: whichever expires first, your supplier policy or the settlement system rule, is your real void window. An 18-hour NDC window collapses to four hours on a ticket issued at 20:00.
"End of day" — whose day?
On sources with an end-of-day policy, the most frequent mistake is not verifying which time zone "end of day" is read in. Three clocks speak at once: the supplier's system time, your office time, and the local time of the market the ticket was issued in. When they diverge, a ticket that shows "window open" on your screen may already be closed on the supplier's side.
The fix is not a fine adjustment; it is a blunt, safe rule: on sources with an end-of-day policy, stop issuing tickets in the last 60 minutes before the desk closes. If the customer insists, hold the booking on option instead of issuing, and ticket it the next morning. This is not a slowdown, it is insurance: the void right on a ticket issued in that last hour expires while you are shutting the desk, and the mistake cannot be carried into tomorrow.
The list of work that must not be handed over at shift change should be short:
- Tickets issued today from end-of-day sources where the customer's confirmation is still unsettled
- Every ticket issued from a source whose window is shorter than 30 minutes
- Ticketing attempts that came back as "pending" from the supplier and whose status is still unresolved
- Bookings that raised a fare difference alert but have not been reviewed
- Cancellation requests originating from sources with an offline cancellation mode
The right your passenger thinks they have is not your obligation
Customers say "I have 24 hours to cancel for free" constantly. There is a basis for that sentence — but not where they think it is.
The US rule 14 CFR 259.5(b)(4) obliges carriers either to hold a reservation at the quoted fare without payment, or to allow cancellation without penalty, for at least 24 hours — but only where the reservation was made one week or more before departure. More importantly, the text binds carriers; agencies are not the direct addressee. That rule shapes expectations far beyond the United States, because global online travel brands advertise a 24-hour cancellation promise worldwide, and your customer has read it.
That produces three consequences for an agency. First, the thing the customer calls "my legal right" may simply not exist in the channel you issued through. Second, if you intend to grant it anyway, do it as a priced commitment rather than a favour — because the cost lands on you. Third, if you do not state the difference in writing at the point of sale, you will inevitably create an expectation funded from your own pocket.
There is a second misconception worth killing early, particularly in Europe. The 14-day right of withdrawal that consumers know from online shopping does not apply to flights. EU Directive 2011/83 on consumer rights excludes passenger transport services in Article 3(3)(k), keeping only Article 8(2), Article 19 and Article 22 in force. Two of those survivors are worth knowing:
- Article 19 — a trader may not charge a payment-method fee that exceeds the cost the trader actually bears for that means of payment.
- Article 22 — any extra payment beyond the agreed price requires the customer's express consent, and consent may not be inferred from a default option the customer has to switch off.
Article 22 is not an abstraction for an agency. A service fee added as a pre-ticked box is exactly the pattern the article was written against.
Where a genuine reimbursement right does exist, it is a different situation entirely. Under EU Regulation 261/2004, denied boarding (Article 4(3)), cancellation (Article 5(1)(a)) and a delay of at least five hours (Article 6(1)(c)(iii)) all trigger Article 8, and Article 8(1)(a) requires reimbursement within seven days of the full ticket cost for the parts not flown — plus the parts already flown where the flight no longer serves any purpose in relation to the passenger's original travel plan.
Make the distinction explicit to your staff: Regulation 261 governs disruption caused by the carrier. It does not cover a passenger changing their mind, wanting a different date, or abandoning the trip. A sales agent who blurs those two situations in one sentence has just made a promise you cannot keep.
Split bookings: the hidden cost of the cheaper quote
Sourcing the outbound leg from one supplier and the inbound from another, then presenting them as a single quote — a split booking — creates a genuine price advantage. Combining the best leg from each of two sources can undercut a single-source round trip noticeably.
The problem is not the sale; it is everything after it. A split booking looks like one ticket to the customer, but it carries two separate policy tails behind it: two void windows, two cancellation modes, two refund rules. None of them are synchronised with each other.
Two legs look like one booking; after the sale they behave as two separate policies.
The hardest constraint is on the exchange side: a ticket exchange generally cannot be performed on a split booking. On our own platform this is explicitly blocked as a release limitation and the operation returns with a reason code. So when the passenger wants a new date, you do not have a reissue option; the only thing you can do is refund and rebook.
That is a decision to be made at the point of sale, not after it. Work it through with a simple calculation (the figures are illustrative — substitute your own history):
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Single-source round trip quote | EUR 640 |
| Split quote | EUR 600 |
| Split advantage | EUR 40 |
| Cost if the date is changed (penalty + fare difference) | EUR 190 |
If your date-change rate in this customer segment is 20%, the expected change cost is 0.20 × 190 = EUR 38. The EUR 40 advantage only just clears it.
Decision rule: do not sell a split unless the advantage is meaningfully larger than change probability × change cost. For corporate accounts, flexible-date travellers and long-lead bookings, make single-source your default. If you do not know your own change rate, measuring it is the first job — that single number determines your entire split policy.
Repricing before payment
A fare moving on the payment screen is not a fault; it is the consequence of a delay. A search result is a photograph, and photographs age.
The windows measured on our own platform are these: the search result cache lasts 30 minutes, and the search de-duplication window is 10 minutes. The second one means that if the same search is repeated within 10 minutes, the supplier is not called again and the result already in hand is reused. From a staff perspective that is usually a good thing — the query returns instantly. But it becomes a trap for an agent running a long phone conversation, because the age of the price on screen is invisible.
Two rules follow:
- If the customer's decision time has exceeded 30 minutes, revalidate the fare before moving to the purchase step. Run a fresh search; do not trust the result you are holding.
- When a difference appears, stop and tell the customer the new number. Waving it through with "we'll sort it out later" means that difference stays with you permanently.
Standardise the phrasing your team uses when quoting by phone: when you give the number, give its validity alongside it. "This fare is valid now — if we complete the booking within half an hour, we hold this figure" ends most of the later arguments at the moment of sale.
An exchange is not a negotiation, it is a quote with an expiry
When an exchange request arrives, the most common mistake is quoting a number off the top of your head on the phone. A reissue is not a haggle; it is a calculated figure, pinned to a specific source, and it has an expiry.
The flow works like this: the new date is priced through a search pinned to the source the ticket was issued from; the difference and the penalty are calculated for the selected flight; when the quote is approved the fare is revalidated, and if the amount has moved the new figure is shown before anything is executed. Once approved, the difference is collected from the agency account first, then the ticket is exchanged. Old and new ticket numbers are retained as an audit trail.
On our own platform the quote is valid for 30 minutes and can be in six different states. In plain terms: "let me go home and talk to my partner tonight" means the quote is dead.
The number you give the customer is made of three items, and all three must be spoken separately:
| Item | Where it comes from | Told to the customer |
|---|---|---|
| Airline change penalty | Fare rule | Yes, as its own line |
| Fare difference | Current price of the new date | Yes, as its own line |
| Agency service fee | Your own policy | Yes, as its own line |
Rolling the three into a single number is easy in the short term and expensive in the long term: when the customer questions the figure you cannot break it down, and lost trust turns into a refund request.
Rule: if the quote has expired, do not repeat the old number — have it recalculated. Confirming an expired quote means absorbing the difference yourself.
Not every supplier offers online cancellation
The question rarely asked before signing and most painful at midnight: can you cancel a ticket issued from this source from your own panel, or do you have to email the consolidator?
On some sources there is no online cancellation of a ticketed booking; the process runs offline, meaning by hand and subject to the other party's office hours. The operational consequence: a cancellation request that arrives at 23:00 rolls over to the next day, and the void window closes in the meantime. The next morning you no longer hold a void; you hold a penalised refund.
Which is why there is a matrix to complete on day one of every supplier setup:
| Source | Online cancellation | Channel if offline | Out-of-hours route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Example: NDC connection | Yes | — | Own panel |
| Example: GDS account | No | Consolidator email | On-call phone |
| Example: Direct airline | Yes | — | Own panel |
| … | … | … | … |
If the last column stays empty, either stop issuing from that source outside office hours or price that risk knowingly. Signing a contract without a written, realistic service level for offline sources means accepting a cost you cannot control.
When the ticketed amount differs from what you collected
After payment is taken, the final amount reported by the supplier does not always match the amount on the booking to the cent. The difference can come from currency conversion, a tax item that moved at the last moment, or a fare update. It looks small — a few euros a ticket. Across thousands of tickets a month it is not small.
How the difference is caught matters. When the supplier's final amount arrives it is compared against the booking amount, a reconciliation record is written where a difference is found, and a warning marker appears on the booking. The collected list of those records is visible in a separate report broken down by currency. The critical point: closing a reconciliation item is not automatic, it is an operator decision. The report does not clean itself up; somebody has to look.
The report also has a practical limit: it scans a maximum of 5,000 records. If your monthly ticket volume exceeds that, the report will not show you the whole month. A routine falls straight out of this:
- Run the report weekly, not monthly. Running it monthly means never seeing part of the month, because of the scan ceiling.
- Read differences by currency. Aggregating into one currency prevents you distinguishing an FX-driven difference from a genuine pricing error.
- Escalate differences above a threshold you set (a specific amount per ticket, for instance) to an operator decision, and close the rest in bulk.
- Track recurring differences from the same supplier separately — at that point it is no longer an incident, it is a contract matter.
You also need the exchange rate used and the moment of conversion written onto the booking. Without that record you will not win a single FX argument with a customer or a supplier.
Distribution cost changes your refund decision too
Making void and refund decisions purely on the ticket price is an incomplete calculation. If you can buy the same ticket through different channels, the channel's own cost is part of your decision.
Lufthansa Group's distribution cost charge is the most visible example. From 1 January 2026, the per-ticket charge on traditional GDS bookings is EUR 22.50 for Sabre and EUR 23.00 for Travelport; the Amadeus figure, raised to EUR 18.00 on 1 January, went up again to EUR 19.00 from 5 May 2026. By contrast, bookings made over an NDC connection stay at EUR 8.00 across all three GDSs.
The distribution cost of the same ticket roughly triples depending on the channel. Source: Lufthansa Group; reported by Travel Market Report and Aviation.Direct, 2026.
The direction of that gap is not an accident, and volume is following it. Accelya reported that corporate NDC bookings grew 168% year on year in Q4 2025, with GDS-distributed NDC volumes up 162%. In the US market, ARC data showed NDC accounting for 21.6% of transactions settled through ARC in May 2026, with the number of agencies reporting NDC transactions reaching 1,197.
But this needs a careful reading, because two effects pull in opposite directions. The NDC channel is cheap in distribution terms; against that, on the defaults we measured, the NDC source has one of the widest void windows at 18 hours, while the GDS source is limited to end of day. Channel choice therefore changes cost and flexibility at the same time.
Decision rule: when the same ticket is available from two sources, do not compare on ticket price alone. Read three items together — the ticket price, that channel's distribution cost, and that source's void window. For a passenger with a high probability of changing, a few euros of distribution difference is irrelevant next to a wide void window; for a passenger with fixed plans, the reverse holds.
The first 24 hours: a checklist
Every control point is tied to a threshold; once the threshold passes, that control gets more expensive.
The list below is written to be printed and pinned above the operations desk.
First 5 minutes
- Has the ticket number landed on the booking
- Does the passenger name match the passport exactly
- Which source was the ticket issued from and what is that source's void window
- Is this a split booking — and if so, has the customer been told an exchange is not possible
First 30 minutes
- Does the amount collected match the ticket amount
- Are the exchange rate and moment of conversion recorded on the booking
- If an exchange quote is open, has it been approved before expiry
First 4 hours
- Has the supplier's final amount arrived, and is there a difference
- If there is a difference, has a reconciliation record been opened and who owns it
- Are there any ticketing attempts still pending
Before end of day, 23:59
- Are there tickets from end-of-day sources still awaiting a void decision
- Have requests from offline-cancellation sources been passed to the other party
- Has the "cannot be carried into tomorrow" list been cleared
- Have voids been verified on both the reservation and the reporting side
What you cannot automate
The most expensive mistake in a software purchase is assuming a capability exists when it does not. The items below are common expectations, and some of them are things we do not offer either — which is why they are given here not as features but as questions to ask during the purchase conversation:
- Is there rule-based automatic ticketing? Can you define a rule saying "auto-issue bookings meeting this condition", or is every issue triggered by hand?
- Are there bulk operations? Bulk issue, bulk cancel, bulk refund — or does everything run one booking at a time?
- Can the full fare rule text be displayed? Or do you only see brand-level refund/change status and the penalty amount?
- Is settlement file processing included? Can the system read and compare the BSP file, or does it only show the supplier-versus-collection difference held inside itself?
- Can the void window be defined per account? Or is a single duration applied to every supplier?
- Is there an alert before the void window expires? Through which channel does it arrive, and who does it reach?
Get these six answered on screen during the demo. "It's on our roadmap" means "no" for the operation you are running today.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a void and a refund?
A void means the ticket is treated as if it had never been issued: no fare penalty arises and the full amount comes back. A refund is the recovery of an issued ticket, with a penalty deducted according to the fare rule. A void is only possible inside a limited window; once the window closes, a refund is the only option.
Is the void window the same for every airline?
No. It depends on both the source and the settlement system. The defaults we measured are 1,080 minutes for the NDC source, end of the ticketing day for GDS sources and 5 minutes for other sources. On top of that, two different accounts with the same supplier can carry two different windows. You cannot write an operating rule without first building this inventory for your own supplier list.
How long is the void window in a BSP market?
According to Travelport's agency documentation, in BSP markets an electronic ticket can only be voided on the day it was issued; the "next business day" allowance available in ARC markets does not exist here. In practice this means your binding deadline is the end of the same day, even where your supplier policy is longer. Most markets outside the United States settle through BSP.
Can dates be changed on a split (dual-source) booking?
Generally no. On our own platform a ticket exchange on a split booking is blocked as a release limitation and the operation returns with a reason code. The only thing available in that situation is to refund the existing ticket and rebook. That is why you should be careful about selling a split quote to a passenger who may want to move their dates.
What should I do if the fare changes on the payment screen?
Stop and tell the customer the new number. The difference comes from the search result ageing; the search result cache is 30 minutes. If the customer's decision time has exceeded that, revalidating the fare before moving to the purchase step should already be a standing rule.
Does the customer have a 24-hour free cancellation right?
This expectation comes from the US rule 14 CFR 259.5(b)(4), which has two important limits: it only covers reservations made at least a week before departure, and as written it binds carriers, not agencies. So the right does not automatically exist on every ticket sold through an agency. In the EU there is no equivalent general right either — Directive 2011/83 Article 3(3)(k) excludes passenger transport from the 14-day distance-selling withdrawal right. If you intend to offer that flexibility, price it as a deliberate commercial decision.
When must a passenger be reimbursed if the flight is cancelled?
Under EU Regulation 261/2004, denied boarding, cancellation and a delay of at least five hours give the passenger a choice under Article 8: reimbursement within seven days of the full ticket cost for the parts not flown (and for parts already flown where the journey no longer serves its purpose), re-routing at the earliest opportunity, or re-routing at a later date of the passenger's convenience. This governs disruption caused by the carrier; it does not cover a passenger deciding not to travel.
How do I notice when the ticketed amount differs from what I collected?
The supplier's final reported amount is compared against the booking amount and a reconciliation record is opened where a difference is found. Those records are listed in a separate report broken down by currency, but closing them is an operator decision rather than an automatic step. Because the report scans a maximum of 5,000 records, it should be run weekly rather than monthly.
Five things you can do tomorrow morning
- Build your void window inventory. For every supplier account you are connected to, write the window type, the duration and the safety-margin-adjusted decision cut-off into a single table. Without that table it is impossible to write an operating rule.
- Complete the cancellation mode matrix. Which sources have online cancellation and which do not; for the offline ones, what is the out-of-hours channel? Every empty row is a midnight request that will go unanswered.
- Put the end-of-day rule into force today. Stop issuing from end-of-day sources in the last 60 minutes before close; hold the booking on option instead.
- Measure your own change rate. How many tickets in the last three months came back with a date change request? That single number determines your entire split booking policy.
- Make the fare reconciliation report a weekly routine. Write down its owner, its day, and the difference threshold that escalates to an operator decision. A report with no owner does not get read.
None of these five requires buying software. Four of them fit in a table and one fits in a calendar entry. Most post-sale loss does not come from a complicated technology problem in the first place — it comes from a rule nobody wrote down.
Sources
- 14 CFR § 259.5 — Customer Service Plan, Legal Information Institute (Cornell Law School) — the 24-hour hold/penalty-free cancellation obligation and the "a week or more" condition
- Regulation (EC) No 261/2004, EUR-Lex — Article 8(1)(a) reimbursement within seven days; Articles 4(3), 5(1)(a) and 6(1)(c)(iii) as triggers
- Directive 2011/83/EU on consumer rights, EUR-Lex — Article 3(3)(k) exclusion of passenger transport, keeping Articles 8(2), 19 and 22 in force
- Void tickets — Travelport Smartpoint agency documentation — BSP and ARC void deadlines and the same-day rule for exchange tickets
- Differentiation of Distribution Cost Charge per Global Distribution System, Lufthansa Group — the GDS-based distribution cost charge
- Lufthansa Group Hikes GDS Booking Fee for Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport, Travel Market Report, 2026 — 1 January 2026 amounts: Amadeus EUR 18.00, Sabre EUR 22.50, Travelport EUR 23.00
- Lufthansa Group to Raise GDS Surcharge Again in May, Travel Market Report, 2026 — Amadeus EUR 19.00 from 5 May 2026
- Lufthansa increases distribution cost charge for Amadeus and Sabre, Aviation.Direct, 2026 — distribution cost staying at EUR 8.00 on the NDC channel
- Corporate NDC bookings jump 168% as GDS-distributed volumes rise 162%, Accelya, January 2026 — Q4 2025 year-on-year NDC growth figures
- US Agency Air Ticket Sales Reach $9.8 Billion as NDC Holds at 21.6%, Travel Distribution News (ARC data), 2026 — NDC share of 21.6% and 1,197 agencies reporting NDC transactions in May 2026